Met Office seasonal and climate models

The Met Office Hadley Centre develops configurations of the Met Office Unified Model which are suitable for seasonal, decadal and centennial climate predictions.

These are usually lower resolution than the models used for day to day weather forecasting, and include ocean and sea-ice components coupled to the atmosphere model in order to represent the full coupled climate system. Additional processes associated with atmospheric chemistry and the ecosystem are included in "Earth System" configurations only (due to computational cost). Current operational configurations are indicated in the table below, with higher horizontal and vertical resolution versions under development.

Climate change predictions

Centennial climate predictions from the Met Office Hadley Centre have been included in all of the climate change
Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The named climate configurations used in these reports were:

HadGEM1 is the first in a new generation of coupled climate models incorporating a non-hydrostatic, fully compressible, deep atmosphere formulation with a semi-implicit semi-Lagrangian time integration scheme.